Category Archives: South Carolina

Tailgaters do it when the University of Tennessee plays the University of Florida. Georgia Bulldogs fans also do it when the Florida Gators are in town. Fans do it when LSU plays Florida and when Mississippi State plays Florida. They roast, grill, or barbecue whole alligators.

Alligator tail steaks are another favorite, the tail being the tenderloin. Harlon Pearce of Harlon’s Louisiana Seafood says that alligator tail has four cylindrical tubes of muscle, or four lobes, like tuna. “You slice that and pound it like veal, and you cannot tell the difference,” he told the Times-Picayune of New Orleans. “You can handle and treat that like a good piece of meat, even grill it.”

Donald Barkemeyer, whose renowned alligator sausage you can buy at Winn-Dixie, says he cooks alligator tail with just butter, lemon, and garlic, baking it at 350 for half an hour.

The rest of the alligator is red meat and is tougher than the tail. It’s better braised in a nice sauce, says chef Greg Sonnier.

Licensed alligator farms throughout the Southeast supply meat to grocery stores and restaurants and also ship alligator meat to various other parts of the world. And alligator hunting is legal in South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. There is no typical way to catch alligators legally in this country.

In some places an alligator must be restrained before you shoot it; other places allow you to shoot free swimming alligators. Some places allow you to use a shotgun with #4 shot or smaller; other places prohibit shotguns altogether. In Texas you can’t use a firearm on an unrestrained alligator at all unless you’re on private property.

In Arkansas you must use a shotgun (or shotgun shell loaded bangstick) to kill the alligator, while in other places you can use a handgun of any caliber.

In Florida, once the alligator is attached to a restraining line, the only way you can shoot it is with a bangstick. Chris Eger has a tutorial on what that is:

To sketch out the broad strokes, it’s a pole with a stainless steel chamber attached to it that holds a live round of ammunition over a fixed firing pin. When you hit the dangerous end of this chamber with a good amount of oomph onto a target, it forces the round back onto the pin and out fires a projectile.

Most manufacturers use a simple cotter pin, hairpin, or braided wire thread as a physical safety so that the bangstick doesn’t go off until you really want it to. There is no trigger.

There are also no sights and no magazine or action as with other firearms. Chris Eger says even though bangsticks fire modern rimfire and centerfire rounds, the ATF does not consider them to be regulated firearms. (He cautions that if your bangstick is shorter than 26 inches and has a firing pin, you have an unregistered NFA firearm, which can land you right in the slammer.)

Unregulated alligator hunting from the nineteenth century to the 1940s nearly drove alligators in the US to extinction. In 1941 Alabama became the first state to pass legislation to protect them, and by 1967 the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) was put on the Endangered Species List. They rebounded to such an extent that they were removed from the Endangered Species List in 1987. They do remain federally protected.

In some areas, especially Florida, people see them as a nuisance.

There is also a demand for their skins and meat, so alligator hunting and farming are thriving. They do have their local ups and downs, of course. Some alligator hunters in Louisiana weren’t as enthusiastic last season as they had been in seasons past. They said that because of the overabundance of alligator skins and the economy being down, a lot of people just weren’t buying.

One can make an excellent case that AAVE (Ebonics), Bayou/Cajun English, Deep South English, Appalachian English, New York English, Newfoundland English, and of course Jamaican creole and Scots are separate languages. Even Scottish English and Geordie probably qualify.

A recent study found only 54% intelligibility for Standard English speakers of Geordie. The speakers were L2 English learners in the Czech Republic, but they scored 100% on the “home” test, which was a test of a US television English. Another study found 42% intelligibility of Scots for native speakers of US English. Having heard Hard Scots spoken by the Scottish underclass, I would say my intelligibility of it was ~5-10% at best or possibly even less. It was almost as bad as listening to something like Greek, and one got the feeling listening to it that you were actually listening to some foreign tongue like, say, Greek.

At any rate, 42% and 54% very well qualify both Scots and Geordie as separate languages. Scots is already split, and it sure would be nice to split Geordie, but to say people would get mad is an understatement.

Scots and Jamaican creole are already split off. There is a lie going around the intellectual circles that it is still controversial in Linguistics whether Scots and Jamaican Creole are separate languages. In fact it is not controversial at all.

I have been listening to English my whole life as an American, and I still cannot understand Bayou speech, hard Southern English, Newfoundland English or the hard forms of Appalachian English or New York English. There are some very weird forms of English spoken on the US Atlantic coastal islands that cannot be understood by anyone not from there, or at least not by me. Gulla English in South Carolina is already split as a creole.

Generally the criterion we use is mutual intelligibility. Also if you can’t pick it up pretty quickly, it’s a separate language.

A speaker of hard New York English came to my mother’s school a while back, and no one could understand him. They still could not understand him after three months of listening to him – this is how you know you are dealing with a separate language. He finally learned how to speak California English, and then he was understood.

I have been listening to hard British English my whole life, and I still cannot understand them. I even had a British girlfriend for 1.5 years, and I still could not understand her on the phone. She went to my parents house for dinner, stayed a couple of hours, and my brother said he didn’t understand a word she said.

You can make an excellent case that the harder forms of British English (or Australian English for that matter) are not the same language as US English. The problem is that if you tried to split them off, everyone would go insane (including a lot of very foolish linguists), and there would be a wild uproar.

Generally we use 90% as the split between language and dialect. Less that that, separate language. More than that, dialect. We use this criterion to split languages from dialects everywhere, yet if we tried to do it for English, the resulting firestorm would be so ferocious that it would not be worth it, but it would be perfectly valid scientifically. Even the very well-validated split of Scots has driven the English-speaking world half-nuts.

I actually have a post in my drafts where I split English into ~10-15 different languages, but I have been terrified to post it. My post splitting German into 137 different languages did not go over well with the Net linguists (who are mostly loudmouths, fools, cranks, and idiots), although a major Germanist, a professor at a big university in Europe wrote me when I was only at 90 languages and said, “I think you are right!” Still, if I try to split English, I may ignite one Hell of a damned firestorm, and I’m just too chicken.

Anyone heard of this guy? A serial out of South Carolina. Article from November of last year. They think he killed seven people. I had never even heard of this case. Wow these serials are getting so common that I am starting to miss even the big ones, and I am a serial watcher. I think this is nothing new, as it’s been going on for a while. The FBI says how many serials are running around the country at any one time? 35? More?

The first time Steven Leckart had a Carolina Reaper is an experience he’ll never forget. He says he popped one into his mouth, chewed it thoroughly, and swallowed. Without warning, he says, a numbness shot through his right pinkie, then up into his biceps. Strangely, a mellow head rush set in and a tear trickled down his cheek. And then (as he described in real time):

All hell just broke loose in my mouth. My tongue is burning. My upper lip is stinging. My eyes are bloodshot. It’s like being face-fucked by Satan himself.

He had just eaten a sample of the hottest chili pepper on Earth, as declared by the Guinness Book of World Records. When you first bite into a Carolina Reaper, you’ll find it sweet with a fruity essence. But within moments the astronomical amount of capsaicin takes over. The results are not pretty and might include vomiting and severe abdominal distress, to put it nicely.

The Carolina Reaper is the creation of Ed Currie of Fort Mill, South Carolina. He had been crossbreeding plants since his boyhood in Michigan and eventually used his skills to produce some potent marijuana plants. He began crossbreeding peppers after he read scientific papers suggesting that their chemical compounds might reduce the risk of heart attacks and cancer, two diseases that run in his family.

It took 12 years of crossbreeding for Currie to produce his world-famous chili pepper. He tested hundreds of hybrid combinations before he crossed a LaSoufrière pepper from the Caribbean island of St. Vincent and a Naga pepper from Pakistan to create Smokin’ Ed’s Carolina Reaper. The company describes its effect as a tidal wave of scorching fire.

Pepper aficionados measure the heat of chili peppers in Scoville Heat Units (SHU). The Carolina Reaper has an official heat level of 1.5 million SHU (the hottest individual Reaper was measured at 2.2 million SHU). By comparison a jalapeño pepper ranges from 3,000 to 10,000 SHU. Currie’s employees at the PuckerButt Pepper Company (the actual name) have to wear two pairs of protective gloves while peeling the chilis and scraping out the seeds. The chili oils will eat through one pair of gloves in 15 minutes.

Demand for Currie’s peppers shot up after the Guinness Book named the Reaper the world’s hottest pepper. Americans are eating more peppers than ever, in fact, and a lot of those peppers are made into salsa. But only a fraction of fresh peppers eaten in the US are grown in the US. Most chili peppers (more than 70 percent) are imported from Mexico. Pepper production in the Southwestern US has been plagued by drought and plant diseases – and concerns about labor costs, naturally.

Ed Currie says he never doubted that he could grow the hottest peppers in the world in South Carolina. He grows most of his peppers in greenhouses, which allow him to fine-tune the microclimate for each crop and variety. All of his products (he also grows onions, tomatoes, garlic, herbs, and spices) are organic and are grown in either greenhouses or irrigated fields.

No research has confirmed Currie’s beliefs about the curative powers of the subcapsinoids in chili peppers, but he eats Reapers throughout the day, every day, and swears to their health benefits. His wife doesn’t know how he stands it.

What’s going to happen to the average person who tries a Carolina Reaper for the first time? “You’ll be crying for an hour,” Currie answers. “Literally crying for an hour.”

Lauren Laubach reported on what Currie calls the strangest reaction anyone ever had to trying a Carolina Reaper. A young woman tried one at the New York City hot sauce show in 2013. Currie recalls:

She put it in her mouth, looked at me and gave me the finger, took five steps back and planted herself flat on the concrete. For 20 minutes straight the string of expletives that came out of her mouth was unbelievable. After 20 minutes she stopped, came over to me and gave me a big kiss and said, “I love you. Let’s do it again.”

Karma, paybacks, etc. are just basic physics, Newton’s Third Law in action. Let’s face it. This punk got it because of a universal law about the universe. Not a crackpot notion, not even a theory, but a damned law. Try avoiding some of the laws of the universe. You can’t. Mother Nature always bats last.

One thing that I often tell my counseling clients is that you cannot run from your fears because that is exactly what most all of them are doing. And in a similar way, I have a feeling that it is often pretty useless to try to hide, avoid or run away from your karma. Your fears, like your karma, always catch up to in the end no matter how fast you run. We have to face our karma whether we want to or not. It’s like the Day of Reckoning that’s always looming outside your door, rain or shine, day in and day out until the end. And you can’t stay inside forever.

Instant karma’s going get you, Dylan. It’s going to knock you right in the face!

To Fly Or Not To Fly (the Confederate Flag)

by Nominay

That flag again.

Recently, I had an unpleasant debate with a friend of a friend about the Confederate flag and its usage. My friend had an ideological take on the subject which I didn’t find to be practical. Basically, his view was that flags are just woven material with patterns and designs, and don’t mean anything. It’s just that because we are all crazy that we project meaning onto these inanimate objects we call flags, and use them as an excuse to display emotions improperly. Therefore, it was okay for the state of South Carolina to sanction and fly the Confederate flag, as it would have been for it to fly any flag on its public grounds, or to have had no flag at all. For him it was just a First Amendment issue marked by relativism.

My friend’s friend agreed, but he took it a bit further. He stated that the American Flag was just as offensive as the Confederate Flag because white men owning slaves founded the United States. Along with slavery, the American Flag flew full mast over segregation of African Americans, internment of Japanese Americans, and worst of all, a genocide of Native Americans.

But really he was playing Devil’s Advocate, because the Confederate flag flying on state grounds was just fine by him as it represents southern heritage to many. He even posted a link to a poll which showed that, prior to the Charleston massacre, only 61% of blacks in South Carolina wanted the Confederate flag to come down, and 27% of black South Carolinans wanted to keep it up! I couldn’t have imagined that that many blacks didn’t have a problem with the Confederate flag. My take? More South Carolinans, black and white alike, have since come to their senses. That damned flag is now down.

The argument against the flag is apparent and pretty straightforward. The Confederates were domestic terrorists, traitors, and were willing to die to treat black people like cattle, and worse. To defend the Confederate flag today as a symbol of southern heritage is as dishonorable as it would be for Germans to defend the swastika flag as a symbol of their heritage. I acknowledge that there are aspects of the US Civil War and Germany in World War 2 that do not parallel each other, but the principle is the same. On human rights issues and on territorial claims, both, the Confederacy and Nazi Germany, were in the wrong and deserved to lose.

The Americans were traitors and terrorists to the British, but on a continent apart and against an abusive king who sought to expand a colonial empire of oppression. As victors over the British, however, we proved our character to be no better than theirs during the American Indian wars. Our flag should not be flown over American Indian reservations … but if – for all of America’s crimes – the American flag should be brought down throughout the rest of the country, then we might as well wish to renounce our citizenship and leave.

The truth on this issue of the Confederacy, the Union it fought, and of its flag, was summed up best by yet another participant in the debate I was in, as follows:

The Confederados of Brazil are using the flag to represent their heritage. Granted, they are Brazilians now even if their ancestors were American confederates. The battle flag is not seen as racist in Brazil but is seen as the flag of a distinct ethnic group. So I can agree, these rags are nothing more than symbols that have different meanings to different people.

When I lived in South Korea, I saw swastikas on Buddhist temples. It was kind of strange for me, because I had never seen a swastika in that context. The swastika is used in India and other parts of Asia and has no connection to Nazi Germany. Surely, the Native Americans who used swastikas in designs on pottery and woven cloths weren’t Nazis.

What bothers me about the battle flag isn’t that some use it to mark their heritage or that others malign the flag because of its links to slavery. Rather, what bothers me is the narrative behind the flag more than its symbolism.

For example: To hear some southerners tell it… “The south just wanted to preserve a way of life that was gentile and hospitable where the sun shined upon the beautiful plantation fields where slaves worked eagerly to please their masters. Slaves were treated kindly and were better off under slavery than free blacks in the North who were starving in the streets. It was not until the Northern invaded us that we went to war to defend our way of life.”

This revisionist viewpoint is utter nonsense.

On the other side, the narrative of Northerners as benevolent non-racists who freed the black man from the shackles of their white southern oppressors is equally as nonsensical. I’ve seen movies/documentaries where Lincoln is portrayed as this enlightened gentleman who holds a black child on his lap and promises to free their people. Lincoln only cared about preserving the union with or without slavery. Neither of the above narratives is truthful or intellectually honest.

If this country ever wants to move past this schism, then we have to appreciate the history of how we got to where we are today. This includes teaching the good, the bad, and the very ugly parts of our history. To me what is more dangerous than a rag hanging from a pole is historical revisionism.

Indirectly related, he added:

All facets of history should be taught. I’m frankly quite irritated at the Texas School Board due to their decision that the KKK and Jim Crow laws need not be mentioned in history books any longer. Several years ago, the same school board axed Thomas Jefferson as a great political thinker because of his views on the separation of church and state.

How do we know this shooting is “racist?” What exactly is “racism?” Lastly, why is black on white crime not “racist”, and, if we don’t refer to those crimes specifically as “racist” whenever they occur, then should we be referring to the rare and occasional white on black crime as “racist” before we know anything about it?

Oh it was racist all right! He reloaded five times and while he was doing it one of the times, someone asked him to stop, and he said, “I have to do this. You rape our women and you are taking over our country.”

Also that church is very famous in civil rights terms.

Why is it racist when a White does it but not when a Black does it? Depends on the motivation. Most Black killings of Whites are probably motivated more by just general criminal motives as opposed to a racist motive against Whites. However, some Blacks do commit racist murders against Whites. The Washington DC snipers and the Black man who shot up the subway in New York are two excellent examples.

It’s not always a racist crime anytime a White kills a Black, but this case, just based on the initial facts of the case, appeared to have a clear racist motive. Now that we hear the statements he made in the shooting, this crime obviously had a racist motive.

This just happened 8 hours ago and it’s all over the news. A young White man walked into a historically Black church at 9 PM during a prayer meeting and sat down. At some point, he stood up and started opening fire. 9 people were killed. No word on how many wounded yet, if any. It appears that most if not all the dead are Black. The man then fled and has not yet been apprehended. A suspect was detained for 2 hours, but he was not the suspect. The suspect is a young White man aged approximately 21 years old.

The logging business in Arkansas has been down so long, says Jan Cottingham, that people are skeptical of any predictions of an upturn. And yet some observers are that confident. What they wonder is whether or not the workers will be there to meet the demand.

Labor concerns in Arkansas reflect what’s going on nationwide: the lumber industry workforce is reaching retirement age and employers don’t know if they’ll see new recruitment coming in. Even with some modest increases in the labor force, challenges remain in drawing young people to the industry.

Much like farming, the logging industry is often multi-generational and family-run, says Matt Jensen. He is the vice president of the Great Lakes Timber Professionals Association in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and a third-generation logger. He says:

This is a business that is really hard to learn and it’s really a lifestyle. If you don’t teach your children the work ethic, they’re not going to continue.

One of the biggest challenges facing the forestry industry is the negative perception about wood usage, according to Scott Bowe of the University of Wisconsin. He thinks it’s hypocritical, because people use wood everyday. “We need fresh, young people to carry the business forward,” he says. “We consume more wood every year. The wood’s got to come from somewhere.”

The question is, who will replace the current generation of loggers?

Logging is capital-intensive, requiring an initial investment of roughly $1 million for heavy equipment like fellers, which cut the trees; skidders, which move the felled trees; processors, which de-limb the trees; and loaders, which lift the logs from piles to trucks. Lenders are reluctant to provide money for new logging businesses.

Whether the businesses are new or established, the amount of work you do depends on the weather. In Arkansas, logging time can be about 40 weeks out of the year. So you’re not going to make a lot of money working in this business. The appeal just isn’t there for a lot of young people.

Steve Richardson owns a logging business in Arkansas and says that every logger has either gotten more productive with fewer people or has gone out of business. Some timber companies are considering forming their own logging crews, a practice that largely disappeared when workers’ compensation insurance rates soared. Vertical integration, in which a company owns the supply chain for its products, used to be typical in the industry, but Richardson is skeptical of its reinstation, saying that those companies don’t know how to work this labor.

These folks that work for me are fiercely independent. They’re not college graduates. They want to make a living, they want to go hunting and fishing on the weekend, and some of them want to start getting drunk on Friday afternoon.

And that mindset doesn’t fit with most business plans, Cottingham says.

Marvin Larrabee of Elk Mound, Wisconsin, says that logging almost has to be passed down in the family. He has four sons assisting him in the business but knows how hard it would be for them to strike out on their own. The expensive equipment is just the start of it. Loggers also have high fuel costs and extremely high insurance premiums. The occupation is consistently ranked one of the most hazardous in the country.

Larry Altman of Vermont was a logger for 20 years. He has pins in his ankle from the time a tree fell on him. On another occasion, his arm was crushed between two logs, but luckily he was working that day with a friend who freed him 45 minutes later.

“You’ll get hurt bad at least one time logging,” he says.

Altman says he’d still do it if you could make money at it, but you can’t.

In this whole picture, there’s a ceiling, and that ceiling is the price paid at the mill. There’s very little wiggle room for the individual logger.

The roots of logging run deep in Vermont. Its first sawmill opened in 1739, and by the middle of the 19th century logging had become Vermont’s largest and most lucrative industry. But today, says Larry Altman, many people, especially in Burlington, have no idea that logging still goes on in Vermont.

Those that become aware of it lump the local timber industry in with large-scale, ecologically devastating logging operations in the Pacific Northwest, Canada, South America, and Asia. The fact is, the vast majority of local loggers are sole proprietors, working alone in the woods, usually equipped with little more than a chainsaw, skidder, bulldozer, and truck.

Some young people are drawn, nevertheless, to the logging business. Will Coleman, 26, and his brother Wesley, 24, started Coleman Brothers Logging LLC, in December 2012. They operate out of Richburg, South Carolina, harvesting pulpwood and saw timber.

The Coleman brothers were able to buy a used Tigercat skidder and feller/buncher with a loan from Natural Capital Investment Fund’s Logging Initiative. NCIF is a business loan fund that provides debt financing to small businesses in West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, south Georgia, and the Appalachian regions of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio.

The Coleman brothers say they doubled their loads in the first week after running the equipment they purchased with their loan.

Out on the West Coast, Billy Zimmerman, 25, has launched his own company, Zimmerman Logging LLC, in Rainier, Oregon. Zimmerman was raised on a tree farm his great-grandfather bought in the 1920s, and discovered his love of tree farming at age 10, when his father let him set chokers – setting cables around logs so they can be hauled away – for the first time. He helped his father with farming before and after school and after football practice.

In December of last year he decided to go into business for himself. His father gave him a bulldozer, saving him the $160,000 he might have needed for a new one, and his parents gave him $3,000 in seed money. He was in business by March, with a company consisting of Zimmerman, his best friend, and his father Ron.

Zimmerman works 11-hour days and is willing to underbid others so he can build a client base and his reputation. And his specialty are small jobs. As he puts it:

There are a ton of little 5- and 10-acre jobs that the guys with big machines cannot justify bringing out there to work that job. But we can. We found our niche in smaller jobs, at least for now, and for what we have it’s been working well.